Under Your Skin (12 page)

I stare at her, lost for words.

After a few seconds, in which I am not sure I might not scream, I say, “I think you’ve got a lovely figure.”

Perivale has left the front door wide open. Why? So I don’t make a run for it? Or maybe he just doesn’t care, concern for normal door-closing etiquette not being part of his remit. A change in acoustic—the vibrating hum of the police car, the rising snarl of the first planes out of Heathrow—has woken Millie. She is sitting on the stairs, clutching her pink rabbit when I come out of my room. “What’s happening?” she says.

I take my daughter’s sleepy face in my hands and kiss it carefully all over. PC Morrow steps past us. “Nothing, Mills. Nothing to worry about,” I say. “I’ll knock on Marta’s room and ask her to get up. I’ve got to go out for work. Just work.”

“Really? Has Daddy gone?”

“Yes. Marta will give you breakfast.”

“Time to go,” PC Morrow says.

“I love you, Millie,” I call, trying not to sound desperate.

•   •   •

“You have got to be kidding,” I say to the man from the Golf when he puts his hand on my head. I twist away from him and he clamps it back down and steers me into the back of the car. I am shaking, but I’m aware of it being funny, the sort of thing I could tell Philip. “I can’t believe you did that! Put your hand on my head! Do they teach that at Hendon? I thought they only did it on
The Bill
.” Apparently not. Apparently they do it in real life, too.

PC Morrow and Perivale are both in the front, Perivale this time in the driver’s seat. “I’ve got to be on air in four hours,” I say. “I’m coming willingly because I didn’t want to upset my daughter
any more than she already was. I am a good, helpful citizen. You have everything wrong; you must have. I haven’t done anything. It’s madness. And, come on, guys, you woke up my daughter, and she’s got school. Oh God, what would have happened if I had had no one to look after her?”

“Arrangements would have been made,” says Knucklehead, who is sitting next to me, slightly too close.

“Another thing, my driver will be here in less than an hour.” I rummage for my phone. “I’ll just ring him and tell him to pick me up from the station. We’ll clear this up quickly, won’t we? It must be a misunderstanding. You won’t need me for long, will you? Actually, can I ring my husband? He’s about to get on a plane.”

Knucklehead takes the phone out of my hand and puts it in his pocket.

Morrow twists round in her seat. “We’ll sort it all out for you. Don’t worry. You won’t have to do a thing. We’ll take care of everything.”

I’ve heard those words before. It’s the mantra of the travel agent Philip is so keen on, the one specializing in “handpicked, tailor-made luxury.”

Funny how the same combination of syllables, in a different context, can sound so chilling.

•   •   •

Who ever thinks they’re going to see the inside of a cell? I’ve got a bench to sit on. A tiny square window up high. That little tent of blue. Except it’s white. The sky is white. Distant drilling. No bucket. Apparently, I can knock on the door if I need to go. I’m so tense I don’t think I’ll ever go again. I’ve got nothing with me. No phone. No pen. No book. You’d think there would be graffiti: “Dan woz here”; “Fuck off.” Not even that to read. Nothing to do, except look at the four blank walls and worry about what is happening to me.

I ask myself out loud if the police have gone mad. I’m Alice down the rabbit hole. I try and think of more cheering precedents, but I can’t. In the last hour, I have been cautioned, informed of my rights, had my photograph taken—click: full frontal; click: turn to the side. I tried, as it was happening, not to think of the reprints. This picture will be shown, like Hugh Grant’s after his dalliance with the LA prozzy, in every piece about me ad infinitum. I tried to come up with something funny to tell Philip. I’ll tell him, I decided, that I kept turning my head, flashing that over-the-shoulder smile that any pro knows is the most flattering of profiles. I didn’t, of course. I looked as glumly petrified as I felt. I couldn’t have raised a smile if you’d paid me. Not a mug shot, a snapshot into my soul.

I have given my fingerprints—and made a thumb of ink on the hem of my skirt by mistake. One of us is never coming out, I thought to myself. There you go: a joke! I could tell Philip that. PC Morrow asked if I wanted to see a copy of
The Codes of Practice and Procedures
.

“Nobody ever does,” she said. “Or I did have one bloke, pissed to the tits, mouthing off all over the place, thick as shit, mind my French. I said, ‘Certainly, sir. Do you want help with the big words?’ ” She giggled. I told her I was all right, thanks.

I’ve turned down legal representation, too. Philip has his own firm of solicitors, posh ones like his travel agent: a sparky solicitor on the third floor for wills, another on the sixth for conveyancing, and presumably another equally sparky on the eighth in the event of murder charges. Only the best for the golden couple. But I don’t want a sparky solicitor. It would be a statement of guilt. I don’t even want to see the duty lawyer. I don’t need to.

“But the duty lawyer’s free!” PC Morrow said, as if they were a sample of a new type of yogurt being handed out in a shopping centre.

I close my eyes. The cell is too small, so I pace in my head. Up and down. Up and down. It doesn’t soothe. I am back in the exam
room; the paper’s turned over, but I haven’t revised. When Millie was first born, I kept having this nightmare that I was in the middle of Bombay, thronging with people, traffic, noise, and Philip was trying to make me jump on to one of those teeming top-heavy buses they go in for in there, but I couldn’t because I was holding a cat, a stray I used to feed in our shed when I was a child, and it was struggling to get free, and I knew if I dropped it, I would lose it. It would be sucked up by the heaving city. I would never find it again.

It was a stupid dream because of the cat—Philip accused me of “moggish sentimentality”—and yet that giddy feeling of standing on the edge of something terrible and inevitable, of a loss waiting to happen, is what I have now. I’m out of control. All that I have—money, house, job, connections—none of it means anything.

Calming thoughts, calming thoughts.

I was allowed one phone call. I tried Philip first, but it went to voicemail. There was a time he would have rung me from the station and the train and the airport, when going away would have made him homesick. That doesn’t happen anymore. He doesn’t have room for that sort of emotion. He didn’t even say good-bye this morning. When he went downstairs, I was expecting him to come back up. I prepared a loving speech about how space would do us good. I was going to hug him hard, just in case it was the last time I saw him. He knows I’m pathetic like that. But this morning he didn’t come back into the bedroom. I heard the taxi outside the window and the front door close.

So I didn’t leave a message. And anyway, what good would it have done? If he had gone through security, they probably wouldn’t have let him back out, and that would have been unbelieveably stressful. And even if they had, perhaps it would end up being for nothing. He would have given up his trip, gone through all the inconvenience and annoyance of that, and I might be home before he got here. I might be having
lunch
.

I hung up.

“Not leaving a message?” PC Morrow asked.

“Didn’t want to use up my go,” I said. I smiled at her.

“You kill me,” she said. “Go on, then. Try someone else.”

Marta answered the home phone on the first ring. Millie was dressed and eating Cheerios. Yes, she had calmed down. “I said to her, ‘Silly girl! Your mother back later. She out all the time anyway.’ ”

I didn’t have the energy to take umbrage, so I laughed and told her I didn’t know how long the police would need me—they had a few questions, that was all—but could she “hold the fort” until I got back? This delayed things a little while, idioms, along with collective nouns, not having yet been covered at the Tooting School of English.

PC Morrow took the phone out of my hand, quite abruptly then, as if I had taken advantage of her benevolence. She said if I wanted she would inform my work that . . .

“Will I be late in today?”

“. . . you won’t be coming in at all.”

We were on the station side of the front desk at this point. She was sitting on a high stool, raised up higher than me, even though I was standing. “Thank you,” I said. I thought about Terri’s panic and Stan’s glee, and Alison Brett, that efficient woman in publicity, and what she would say about all this. Leaning my elbow on the counter, I thumped the palm of my hand on my forehead and rested it there for a moment.

“Oh Lord. Will they be really cross?” she said. “I have no idea what happens in these circumstances. Will Stan the Man be all on his own on the sofa? Poor Stan . . . Oh!” She moved her chin to one shoulder suggestively. “Maybe if I ask nicely, they’ll let me cuddle up next to him instead.”

“Not you, too,” I said.

“Now, what about hubby? Do you want me to keep trying his number and give him a message?”

I went quite still. I thought about Philip being late for my mother’s funeral, how he promised to come home for Millie’s birthday and forgot. His distance, the feeling I have that he is on the verge of a decision. I thought about how important he’d said these meetings were, how tense he has been, how, possibly, if our marriage has any chance at all, he needs time away. I thought about him leaving today without saying good-bye.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll ring him later when I’m home.”

•   •   •

An hour in a cell is a million years outside. I don’t know what I am being kept waiting for. My mind wanders wildly. What would a TV detective say? “Let’s leave her to kick her heels for a bit.” But then what does “kick your heels” mean? Or is it “cool your heels?” Do they want me to be bored? Or calm down? Or do they want me to express exuberance, like a horse?

What do they want with me? Time expands. I can feel every atom moving. Particles shifting.

I don’t eat, even when Knucklehead brings me a completely circular slice of boiled gammon under a completely circular ice-cream scoop of mashed potato.

A young, anxious policeman, still wet behind the ears, calls for me when it is time. He blushes almost girlishly—two pink spots high in his cheeks—when I smile and ask his name. I’m not wearing makeup. My hair is in tatters. He probably doesn’t even recognize me. Who cares what he says about me to his girlfriend, or his mum and dad, when he gets home? I don’t need to play a part. But I have to smile. I don’t know what else to do. Partly, it’s to stop myself from crying.

Perivale gets to his feet when I come into the room—the same,
bland interview room as before—dwarfing the space. I pretend to look around. “I like what you’ve done,” I say. “Have you thought of knocking through?”

It’s a terrible joke. What’s wrong with me?

“Take a seat.”

Knucklehead enters. It is 1347 hours. I know that because Perivale leans forward, hair flopping, and says it into the tape. I also learn that Knucklehead’s real name is Detective Constable de Felice. His parents might be Italian, but he must have grown up here because he speaks with a South London accent. He has hooded green eyes and one of those triangular-shaped faces that Pixar uses for its superheroes—a ridiculously broad forehead tapering to a squarely pointed jaw. I bet his mother hates his hair.

Perivale has been running through the preparatory guff I’ve heard before, plus all the instructions about remaining silent if I want to. I recite my name and my address, and I say no, I definitely have never been to Ania Dudek’s flat before; no, I have never crossed the threshold; no, I had never met her before; and no, I didn’t know her from Adam.

I’m beginning to relax a little. I’m even thinking, Been there, done that, when, with an alacrity that nearly sends the tape recorder flying, Perivale pushes forward across the table and says, “She was pregnant when she was strangled. Do you know that? Eleven weeks pregnant.”

The world stops turning. The edges of the room blur. I hold tight to the edge of the table to stop myself from tipping forward.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so sorry.” It is so much worse than one could possibly imagine. Two bodies. Innocence. Life. Death. A double murder? I don’t know. A dreadful poignancy, a waste.

Perivale’s face comes back into focus. His nose has a bump halfway along it. His skin is blotchy. His hands are shaking slightly. He is as agitated as I am.

“So if you could be a bit less flippant, it would be appreciated.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say again. It is all I can think to say. All the worry about
me,
and what is happening here, and now her again. I don’t want to have to feel any attachment, any pain for her. All along, I realize, it has been easier to block her out.

“Did you know she was pregnant?”

“No. No one has mentioned this before.”

I gaze at Perivale. I wish I could read him. I can’t get a purchase. The boyfriend, the one who wasn’t in the country when she died. Is he back? Is he somewhere grieving? Or could he be involved? I wish I didn’t have to think about these things. I wish I’d never heard of Ania Dudek.

“And you have never set foot in her flat?”

I resist the temptation to scream. “No.”

Perivale and de Felice have exchanged a glance. I wonder if Perivale realizes he is repeating himself. Shouldn’t he be letting de Felice talk? Good cop, bad cop? Forget that. He shifts the papers in front of him.

“So, I’m just interested. You have recently had your garden replanted?”

“Yes.” I have no idea where this is going, but at least we have left her fucking flat.

“Could you tell us a little more about that?”

“Okay.” I will humor him. Perhaps it will help us both. “Front or back?”

“Front, please.”

“Um, yes. Well, we’ve had our basement dug out—took ages, and the builders made a mess of the garden, so we got a special company in called Muddy Wellies—Roger Peedles, the gardening expert at work, recommended them—and they took care of the lot. I told them what sort of thing I wanted—”